A reasonable question to ask is whether the people who operate facilities that provide abortions bear any responsibility for addressing this violence.

As stated earlier, women who are threatened with physical violence unless they have abortions are going to submit in almost every case. Additionally, at Life Dynamics, we can document that abortion clinic operators realize how common this problem is.

Over the years, we have acquired tape recordings of National Abortion Federation (NAF) conventions in which discussions about women being forced to have abortions were held. The prevailing attitude expressed in these sessions may best be described as one of “convenient indifference.” Attendees will acknowledge the problem’s existence and talk about it in disapproving tones, while making it clear that they feel no obligation to let it influence the way they deal with these women.

Their philosophical position seems to be that, even if a woman chooses to have an abortion she doesn’t want because of threats from others, it remains within the “pro-choice” purview since she was still the one who ultimately made the decision. In fact, on the NAF tapes mentioned above, some abortion clinic employees can be heard paraphrasing this very argument and using it to justify their habit of looking the other way. It is a truly bizarre rationalization analogous to saying that women who submit to sexual relations at the point of a gun are not really being raped since, technically, they are consenting.

At the clinic level, there are also two additional considerations.

The only plausible explanations for why an abortion would be performed on her are that (a) no counseling is done, (b) the counselor is grossly incompetent and should never have been trusted with this responsibility or (c) the counselor’s personal, financial or political bias in favor of abortion neutralizes any concern for the victim.

It is interesting to note that Herculean efforts have been made to protect abortion providers against violence.

The United States Congress has held hearings on abortion clinic violence; federal laws have been passed to restrict pro-life activities in ways that have never been contemplated with any other issue; RICO statutes enacted to go after organized crime have been used against individual pro-life activists; the FBI and the Department of Justice have created special task forces solely for the purpose of protecting abortion providers; federal marshals have been assigned to stand guard at abortion clinics; police departments continue to openly and routinely violate the First Amendment rights of peaceful pro-life protesters; and the list goes on ad infinitum.

In order to appreciate how out-of-proportion these responses have been, it should be remembered that only eight abortion clinic homicides have occurred in the almost 40 years since abortion was legalized. By any reasonable analysis, infrequent acts of violence against a tiny group of abortion doctors have been given a level of attention that is so extraordinary, nothing remotely similar has ever been given to any other segment of society.

This effort has been the result of enormous pressure exerted upon the American political process by the abortion lobby. Interestingly, the group being given this historically unprecedented level of protection is overwhelmingly male. At the same time, however, these same abortion lobby activists have shown a stark indifference toward the exponentially larger number of women who are being brutalized or murdered for refusing to have abortions.

From this comparison, it is obvious that, among those who most staunchly support abortion, these men count and these women don’t.

Adding to this is the fact that the leaders of the contemporary “women’s movement” are acutely aware of this situation and remain stone cold silent about it. For political and public relations reasons, those who most loudly proclaim “a woman’s right to choose,” have shown no interest in “a woman’s right not to choose.” On one hand, they may not approve of women being bludgeoned or killed for refusing to have abortions. But on the other hand, they have made it clear that they are willing to write-off these women as just collateral damage in the war to keep abortion legal.